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Talk:Ring Builders/@comment-60.240.9.159-20180707000512/@comment-173.175.117.136-20200128085659
'This thread kind of makes me wonder... and it's not the first time I had this thought..... If another Protomolecule --> Eros --> Venus --> Squid was allowed to happen, in Sol System for example, (ideally this time on a gigantic vat of bacteria to avoid the whole genocide thing) would it create another Ring? Would that ring be to the same Ring Space? What the frig would happen!?' Well, the Ring Builders launched Phoebe at something considerably less than light speed toward a protozeric Earth sometime over 2 billion years ago. At this time, eukaryotic life (meaning multicellular) may have already been around then, but if so only in the very recent of then past. Given that it probably took that ice-rock a very long time to get from wherever it was launched to our solar system, you can bet at the time of launch Earth would have been a world of simple single-celled organisms. The first Great Oxygenation Event hadn't even occurred, and the organic nature of the life of our planet was probably known to those Builders. They knew they didn't see any civilization, and reading the diffusal of the sun's rays told them there wasn't much oxygen in our atmosphere. This all suggests they launched Phoebe at our system hoping that it would crash on the earth populated by tiny little dots. This means they intended to have a ring, fully functional and reliable, built up from the simplest life forms we know about. The protomolecule is not actually the complete tech of the alien society, nor is it supposed to be some cure-all for making supersoldiers or achieving immortality; the protomolecule is capable of some truly magical things once it gets enough mass and provided that mass stemmed from a 'seed' complex enough, but whether the PM was hijacking human beings or bacterial yeast once it got massive enough it stopped doing all the magic, most mysterious shit and assumed the travel shape where it would then migrate to an appropriate distance and sightline from the system's primary and form into a twisting toroid, and then eventually the gate would power on and allow for very short travel time between where the Builders already were, and where they had just opened a door to. So protomolecule would hijack self-replicating system (either biological or computational), continue to grow for an indeterminate amount of time, once this spreading goop reached a critical mass it would begin to shape itself into a proper flying position and head out a distance previously assigned astronomical distance before going all ringy and then boom magical space tunnels!' The PM going ham inside Eros appeared as Julie Mao and wanted to fly to Earth because so much of the PM that would go on to infect the people in that station had grown from Julie's own infected body. But in either case, eating people or pimple germs, the PM just wanted to reach a certain mass so that it could finalize it's life cycle as magical unicorn door. I've always wondered if the reason the Arboghast wasn't disassembled over Venus, and its entire crew as well, the PM having so 'human' a beginnig because of what happened to Julie Mao, was because this was a test of whether or not the PM 'understood' how human design and human anatomy broke down to its smallest constituent parts. Once it was found it could, it stopped dicking around and beelined it for the finish line just beyond Uranus (schoolboy giggle).